by MARY HOCKING
As soon as he settled down to the reports on the effects of reorganization on the teaching staffs of the two schools most immediately concerned, other matters raised their claims. The clamour in the office was mirrored in his brain.
‘I should be glad if you would look at my establishment report as soon as possible, sir . . .’
‘There are one or two points on the salary of welfare assistants, sir . . .’
‘It is quite impossible for my staff to cope with all this reorganization data and prepare the minor works programme . . .’
‘The budget enquiry forms must go out to schools soon, sir, and there are a number of queries . . .’
The voices jumbled in his mind and he found himself trying to sort out all these problems at once. From the moment he arrived in the office, he was prey to the members of his own staff; one by one his senior officers stalked him down. Each was concerned with a particular issue which he regarded as of first importance, but each knew that his only hope of winning priority for this all-important problem was to make an impact on Chatterton; each was convinced that he knew Chatterton’s weakness and could use it to advantage so that once he had Chatterton to himself he could win him over. So they goaded, scourged, flattered, threatened, ingratiated, probing for the tender spot, the raw nerve, which, if touched, would galvanize him into action. They did not dislike him, indeed most of them had an affection for him and performed this operation for his own good because they were convinced that if he neglected to pay attention to their problem it would be the undoing of the whole Department. It was very exhausting. At the end of a day, he sometimes felt like a patient in an experimental psychology laboratory.
‘I must make Ellis responsible for general administration,’ he thought. ‘However much they dislike it, I must insist.’
That settled that. But there was a pile of committee papers to offer a further distraction. He had to attend three committee meetings this week and must spare the time to go through the papers. The Sites and Buildings Sub-Committee was tomorrow and there was that question of the compulsory purchase of the Ferrymead Sports Ground for the site of a new secondary school. It was going to be very expensive and it was not well-situated to serve the areas from which the school would draw its pupils.
Chatterton found himself with the area map spread out on his desk, tracing the major roads which isolated the site. What was he doing? He must concentrate on one thing at a time. But his brain no longer obeyed his command, he had lost his inestimable gift of complete concentration, of being able to banish all irrelevancies; he had lost, too, his gift of going straight to the heart of an issue, and now he found himself bogged down in trivialities which other members of his staff could well attend to. For example, was there a zebra crossing at this point? Did the number 27 bus go as far as the Sports Ground or did its run terminate at the Grapes Junction? This was the kind of question on which members who had never had experience of administration expected him to have personal knowledge and he was beginning to be conditioned by their view of his job. He must make a firm stand and put a stop to this nonsense.
He checked himself on the verge of framing a suitable rebuff and turned again to the report on reorganization. He studied the table of staffing requirements and reached for his copy of the Burnham Report; but while he did this he was thinking, ‘there is a danger that that site will be an expensive white elephant, we must make them defer a decision until we have had a chance to go into the whole matter more thoroughly . . .’ But who was to carry out the investigation? He must get the Establishment Committee to appoint a senior officer to deal with the reorganization surveys and statistics. He made a note on a scrap of paper.
The Burnham Report was still open in front of him. Nothing registered. Even the individual words made no impact, it might have been written in Hindi. ‘I suppose that would be right to left,’ he said, ‘or would it?’ He made his eyes pass along a line; his brain threw up an uncoordinated salvo of words, welfare assistants, establishment, grade I post, budget forms . . . He shut the book and put his head in his hands. ‘I must have a stiff drink and go to bed. In the morning I shall feel fresh and be able to clear this away in no time. All one needs for a committee meeting is a grasp of the essentials, other officers can deal with the details. If someone else in the office can do a job, there is no reason for me to attempt it; I am there to do what no one else can do . . .’ The moment he stopped saying these things to himself, his brain ticked over feverishly as though it had been doing it all the time behind his conscious reasoning, welfare assistants, establishment, grade I post, budget forms . . . He had a stiff whisky and went to bed; it was worse there, there was nothing else to do but receive the thought flashes. When he dozed, he was standing at a gigantic table and his brain was flicking down correspondence as one might deal a pack of cards . . . arterial roads, deputy head’s allowance, welfare assistants, safeguarding of existing posts, budget forms, minor works programme . . . the frenzied dealer dealt a second round. He woke up, fighting for control, but it made no difference whether he was awake or asleep, the controlling mechanism had broken down and the thought flashes came faster and faster and faster until it seemed they must end in a blinding explosion. Sometime after dawn he had a bad nose bleed; it seemed to clear his head and he felt better after that.
Chapter Fourteen
Jemima said at breakfast the next day, ‘It was about time something was done.’ She spoke with an air of quiet triumph as though she herself had been responsible for the performance. ‘I thought she was splendid. Those men simply didn’t have an answer for her.’
‘Too articulate, I’m afraid,’ Mylor said. ‘People are repelled by it. You’ve got to stammer and stutter and be lost for words to wring their stony hearts.’
It was on the tip of Jemima’s tongue to tell him that he was arrogant and underestimated the intelligence of the viewing public, but she checked herself and offered more toast instead.
‘I think genuine feeling comes across,’ she said gently.
‘Genuine feeling, yes,’ he agreed. ‘But it wasn’t a feeling performance, was it?’
‘She was trying to help you, darling.’
‘I know she was. And I’m grateful to her and I gloried in it. But I don’t think it will be much help, that’s all.’
Jemima began to clear the table. As she stacked the crockery she said in a casual voice, ‘About Daniel—shall I . . .?’
Daniel had an upset stomach. Jemima wondered whether things had been said at his school about the climbing frame affair. She would like Mylor to make inquiries, but she was not pressing him; she was offering to write a note to the school explaining his absence. Mylor understood this, though he was surprised at her reserve: Jemima was very reserved lately. He said:
‘No. I’ll go over and see old Hibbert this morning. If anything has got around at the school he will tell me.’
Jemima said, ‘All right, darling’ and carried the tray to the kitchen. He followed her.
‘Are you all right yourself?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ She turned on the hot tap and drew on her rubber gloves. Her face lacked any animation. He could not understand it; Jemima did not always say when she was ill, but she indicated the fact fairly conclusively in other ways.
‘Is this getting you down?’ he asked.
‘No more than it is you, I suppose.’ She gave him a pleasant, but rather impersonal smile. ‘Hurry along, or you’ll be late to school.’
‘I’ll see Hibbert this morning,’ he said, expecting that she would start telling him what questions he was to ask.
She said, ‘Good.’
He went out feeling rather uneasy.
He decided to see Hibbert after the mid-morning break; but as he was on the way out, he passed Peter Cathcart standing in the corridor.
‘What are you doing, Peter?’ he asked.
‘Mrs. Croft sent me out,’ Peter replied, without apparent regret. Banishment from the classroom, Mylor had frequently observ
ed, was not synonymous with paradise lost.
‘She says I’m not to go back until the lesson’s over,’ Peter volunteered.
This kind of punishment was the worst possible thing for a boy like Peter Cathcart who had no idea how to occupy himself and would inevitably drift into trouble; but Mrs. Croft was coming towards the end of her teaching life, her reserves of patience and strength were dwindling and Peter Cathcart was a very disruptive element in a class.
‘In that case, I think you had better come and work in my room. We’ll ask Mrs. Croft if you can fetch your books.’
‘Come to get my books,’ Peter said, and under Mylor’s watchful eye, added a surly, ‘please’.
‘He cut a hole in Freda’s pinafore,’ Mrs. Croft explained. ‘And he threw a pair of scissors at Evie. He might have done her a terrible injury. I can’t possibly . . .’
‘Yes, all right, Mrs. Croft.’
Peter did more during the remainder of the morning than he had accomplished in the whole of the present term. It occurred to Mylor that he was by no means as dull as his class teacher made out; some of his bad behaviour might be due to the fact that he was not being extended enough. Well, he thought grimly, that at least is something we can do for him!
‘Why don’t you work like that all the time?’ he asked the boy.
‘She don’t teach like you.’
‘Her methods are probably more modern,’ Mylor said calmly. ‘I haven’t taught arithmetic for some time. But as you have been so troublesome to Mrs. Croft, I think I may move you into Mr. Fairhalls’ class.’ He shepherded the boy to the door and dismissed him. ‘Off you go. And don’t let me find you in the corridor again this afternoon.’
It was twelve o’clock. The lunch-time supervision could for once be left in the capable hands of his deputy. He went out to his car and drove to Daniel’s school which was only a short distance away. It was a bad time to make an unheralded call. As he crossed the pavement he could hear the children singing a hymn, their voices sounding clear and cheerfully pagan on this bright day; through the big plate glass windows he saw them standing round the dining tables, far more orderly than his lot. Hibbert was conducting from the front of the hall, the sun shining on his bald pate. He looked engrossed and happy and would not want to be interrupted now. The children, Mylor observed, looked happy, too. Hibbert’s was an old-fashioned regime, but the school ran like clockwork. Mylor entered the building at the side door and made his way to the secretary’s room: she was out, too, probably at lunch. Everything was very neat and orderly, he noticed; the communicating door leading to the Head’s room was open and he could see that here, too, everything was neat and orderly. It was incredible. He had the feeling that even the sun had to knock and ask permission to come in. Miss Freeth would love working for Hibbert.
There was a pile of record cards on the desk, the secretary was in the process of entering the children’s scores in one of the Moray House picture tests. Mylor, with that lack of scruple which would have outraged Rudderham, flicked through the cards, wondering what sort of a job Hibbert made of his records. He studied the entries at the bottom of the cards, made in Hibbert’s small, precise handwriting. ‘A neat, tidy worker, very conscientious and anxious to please; a delightful little girl . . .’‘Her work is always very carefully presented and her exercise books are a pleasure to behold . . .’‘. . . a cheerful, well-disposed boy, but rather untidy and subject to lapses of concentration . . .’ One could tell Hibbert’s preferences. ‘A wilful, argumentative child, given to unpredictable rages. Over- indulgent parents.’ Definitely not a favourite! Neither was the next one. ‘Very disturbed child. There is trouble between father and mother and child is very much aware of this.’ Poor little brat! He turned the card over and as he did so, he saw the name at the top: Daniel Drew.
He had come for advice and he had got it, unerring and forceful, a blow across the heart; it was doubtful whether the benign Hibbert had ever before made such a direct impact on a parent. With trembling hands, Mylor tried to put the cards back in the order in which he had found them; it was almost more than he could manage, he had about as much control as a spastic over his limbs. How he got out of the school, he was never sure afterwards; but he must have done so without meeting anyone, for the next thing that he knew he was driving his car out of the town. Whether he observed traffic signals or not, he did not know, but eventually he found himself in a country lane. He stopped the car and got out. Sometime in the afternoon, Miss Freeth would get anxious, perhaps she would telephone the police. It did not matter, he was finished with all that now. There was a track across a field and he followed this.
It was high noon, hot and shadowless. A lark was singing, the air vibrating with its ceaseless rapture. Ahead, there was a wood, dense and dark, and he made for this. As he walked, words echoed in his mind, ‘Very disturbed child . . .’ How often he had written this kind of comment. ‘Trouble between father and mother . . .’ How well he knew the effects on the child, the many indications which a teacher received; one could almost tell the days of particular tension at home by studying the child’s written work, observing the ebb and flow of concentration. How he had cursed the adult world for the burdens it so thoughtlessly inflicted on children! Yet he had completely failed to understand what was happening to his own son. He had failed to see that his own son was going through this helpless, childish agony, tormented by this gnawing fear, this lonely groping for an understanding that required a far more mature mind. His own son was being burdened with his parents’ misery, lying awake at night, calling for a glass of water when the raised voices frightened him, coming downstairs to reassure himself that they were both there when there was an ominous quiet, or when the front door slammed; living in terror lest his world should disintegrate around him. Oh Daniel, Daniel! And he and Jemima, like so many other parents, observed the symptoms and told themselves that something was wrong at the school! Visions of other children came to him, the tense child’s body trying to bear the man’s burden, the unaccountable rages when the demand became too much, the lapses into babyish behaviour in a vain endeavour to harness the affections the child was in danger of losing. ‘As if things aren’t difficult enough without Martin playing up like this,’ one woman had said to him; and he had replied, barely able to conceal his contempt, ‘You don’t think there might be a connection?’ The child was clawing at her, trying to hold her to him, putting all his physical and emotional strength into an attempt to avert the danger which threatened him, a danger which he sensed but did not understand. Mylor had thought: this will cripple the child for life if something isn’t done soon. And all the time that he sat there, giving wise advice, trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, he was destroying his own son.
By the time he reached the wood he was sick and exhausted although he had not walked far. He lay down with his face pressed against the earth, beyond thought and feeling. There was no argument for the defence, no complicated solution to seek; the case of Mylor Drew had been summed up with great clarity. All he could sue for now was an hour of grace before he paid his debts. He lay quite still, mind and body in a state of inertia brought about by extreme weakness. Once his lips moved and he cried, ‘Oh Maggie, my love!’ without any conscious idea of rejection having formed in his mind, yet speaking of someone who has already passed out of sight.
The sun slanted through the branches of the trees and fell across his back and the side of his face; gradually it moved behind the trunk of the tree and when he could no longer feel its warmth on his cheek, he got up and went back to the car.
He returned to the school at half-past three. Miss Freeth had been surprised by his absence but had not done anything about it; the unpredictability of his temperament had, it seemed, protected him. If she had not been alarmed before, however, his appearance frightened her now.
‘I haven’t been well,’ he told her. ‘I’m better now.’
‘You must go to the doctor. You look dreadful.’
He sai
d, ‘Yes, all right,’ to keep her quiet. She made him a cup of tea.
‘Did you have a black-out or something?’ she asked, hovering over him with horrified fascination.
‘No, of course not.’ But she would spread it around that he had had a black-out.
When at last she had finished ministering to him and departed, he telephoned Jemima.
‘I’ll be late home,’ he said.
She accepted this bare statement as she accepted everything now, passively and without question. He had not arranged to meet Maggie this evening, the Schools Section was particularly hard- pressed just now and she was taking home the papers for a governing body meeting. As she was working at home she would not be late. He walked down to the bus stop and waited for her. Perhaps it would have been wiser to delay seeing her until time had taken the edge off his feelings; perhaps it would have been easier to write a letter. But instinct told him otherwise. He must do what he had to do now, while he still had the resolution and the strength to see it through. The paving stones danced in the hot sunlight, the outlines of buses furred; nothing was real. The mind demanded a course of action which the heart had not yet accepted; he felt that he had left Mylor Drew somewhere else and that it was another person who was to perform this operation.
When she was some distance away she saw him standing there, limp as a rag doll with all the brightness gone from him, and she knew that something was very wrong long before she was near enough to see his face. Then she said:
‘You’re ill.’
‘Let’s go and have a drink.’
He took her hand and they walked down the High Street together which was a thing that they had been careful to avoid before. They passed several people from the education office, but they did not notice the curious stares. The sun was very bright still and there was an air of festival as young people hurried into the streets, released from offices to glory in the brilliant weather. Pub doors were open and the occupants spilt on to the pavement, laughing and planning the evening’s amusement. Cars went by headed for the coast. Old men brought chairs to the doors of their houses and sat sunning themselves, watching the world go by. Mylor and Maggie threaded their way along the busy streets without talking; he squeezed her hand once or twice, to give her courage or to reassure himself.
